Not long ago, I was in need of just such a respite from the mundane and luckily, I got the chance to do a cool project with the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance.

In support of some upcoming work with various clients, a group within IBM came to our team to ask assistance. They needed help in constructing a showcase enterprise application environment that they could use to host various client sessions. In addition to the initial construction of said environment, they also needed to be able to reconstruct the environment on demand to support many different instances of these client sessions.

Our team, eager to assist, immediately asked the obvious: What do you want in your enterprise application environment? Of course, the answer started with an application, specifically a Java™ web services application.

As they described the kind of application they wanted and the kind of user experience they wanted to provide, various needs became clear, including the following:

The application needed the ability to read and write data from a back-end database.

The application had a strong dependence on the use of HTTP sessions. As such, we needed to ensure these sessions were highly available.

We needed to expose both SOAP and JSON interfaces for the application.

Demand for the application would be inconsistent and experience peaks and valleys.

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